The author of the acclaimed mystery The Unquiet Dead delivers her first fantasy novel - the opening instalment in a thrilling quartet - a tale of religion, oppression, and political intrigue that radiates with heroism, wonder, and hope.

A dark power known as the Talisman has risen in the land. Born of ignorance and persecution, it is led by a man known only as the One-Eyed Preacher. A superstitious patriarchy, cruel and terrifying, the Talisman suppresses knowledge and subjugates women. And it is growing.

But there are those who seek to stop the oppressive spread of the Talisman. A resistance formed of the Companions of Hira - a group of rebels versed in the power of ancient scripture, a magic known as the Claim - believe they have discovered the key to destroying the One-Eyed Preacher and his fervid followers: The Bloodprint.

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BookWorm

2.0 out of 5 starsDisappointing fantasy that rushes too much and lacks enough development of characters and concepts

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 February 2020

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I had really high hopes for 'The Bloodprint' - it sounded like exactly the sort of book I'd enjoy. A high fantasy novel set in Central Asia, with magic wielding heroines embarking on a near-death quest for an enchanted object - maybe not wholly original, but enjoyable if done well. Unfortunately, it wasn't done well.

The novel has very strong feminist themes which are hammered home with a lack of subtlety. And yet much is made of the beauty of female lead character Arian - so much so that all the men in it fall in love with her. This seemed to undermine the message that women had more to offer or rely upon than just their looks. Why couldn't she have been average looking, or her looks simply never referred to?

The characters in the book do have potential, but I never really felt close to them. I struggled to 'get into' the book and understand it's underlying fantasy concepts, which were not well explained. It felt like too much of a whirlwind with one set of characters/objects/concepts introduced and dispatched too quickly before the questors had moved on to the next set. The effect was a story that felt rushed and that I lacked investment in. I grew fed up of feeling confused and in the dark.

In terms of plot, it's pretty standard fantasy stuff. An evil force rules the land. A small band of magic wielding heroes from a secret order tries to resist. A band of companions sets out to find a mysterious object, first crossing all manner of dangerous terrain inhabited by strange and/or dangerous peoples. Of course, the object is hidden in the most dangerous and well guarded place possible. I saw the twist at the end coming a mile off.

It's not terrible - I did find it quite gripping towards the end and I did feel some affinity for the characters and the central love story. But it could have been a lot better and I probably won't bother with the rest of the books in the series.

5.0 out of 5 starsA compelling puzzle box fantasy about real things with real people and real stakes on every page.

Reviewed in Canada on 4 May 2020

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I loved this book. I'm not a fantasy fan at all. I just don't read them. I'm a huge fan of her mystery series though, so I wanted to give this a try. I knew from the first few pages that I would be hooked into the series. Her writing is immediate, visual, and emotive. I felt for the characters and the situations as if they were before me. I adored that the story is written as a commentary on present-day extremism. The Talisman are The Taliban and all the iterations of those in any religious community. I loved how it wove Islamic mythology, theology, law, ethics, and, of course, the Qur'an into a captivating tapestry. This book says something and we should be listening. But totally I nerded out on the puzzle box of the book. The journey of our heroes is along a trail of fascinating clues that must be solved to save the day. It was absolutely delicious.

Set in fictional Khorasan somewhere in Asia the inventive plot of ‘The Bloodprint’ follows a well-worn sequence of heroic activists fighting back against a spiritual zealot ruling over an evil, cruel and misogynistic regime controlling and enslaving them, and for good measure it embraces a quest to find some relic to rally the people. An enlightening feature of this book is its distinction of being a sort of mirror to the real political, cultural and religious situation of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Furthermore the two maps presented before the main text clearly indicate features as large scale Middle East and India with greater detail of what is actually Pakistani and Afghani territory.

‘The Bloodprint’ is a complicated read as it refers to numerous peoples and places in complex language using unfamiliar names and titles. A degree of help is provided via a ‘Glossary’ and a ‘Cast of Characters’, but author Ausma Zehanat Khan is aware of difficulties as hinted in ‘Acknowledgements’ with reference to conflicts over which realities are possible and which are only imaginary. With a PhD in International Human Rights Law Khan displayed her advocacy talents and received awards for ‘The Unquiet Dead’ which is procedural and well-reasoned. Her ethnic background and career with magazine ‘Muslim Girl’ is reflected in ‘The Bloodprint’ but narrative is fantasy based which allows it to be less logical and leads to episodic treatment.

The resultant somewhat disjointed approach makes for an uneven and staccato read with characters blundering from one escapade to another and getting away with reliance on supernatural powers, or intriguing debates over controlling powers and who was friend and who was foe, with searching for clues and solving puzzles. However swashbuckling and gripping this may be for each adventurous episode, or for exposing conflict, the need for actuality is undermined and ‘The Bloodprint’ separates into a series of stories – and it sets up a sequel.

There is little point in continuing this review with a synopsis as so much is piecemeal – sufficient to state ‘The Bloodprint’ is average at best – hence 3-star rating.

I'm a big fantasy fan and thought this would be an interesting different take on the genre - ditch the European medievalism, enter middle-eastern medievalism - well it might have worked. Unfortunately the author has something to say and was non too subtle about it. Add to that a pretty formulaic plot with the "just so" appearance of just what's needed, at just the right time, and a sort of weird magic system that is sometimes a devastating weapon of mass destruction and sometimes entirely useless, and you end up with what's seems a disappointing mess.The tale is set in a rebadged Mesopotamia/Persia where the Osama bin Laden leads the Taliban (oops sorry, I mean "One-eyed preacher" leads the Talisman) on a destructive rampage across the region: burning books, enslaving women, ... you get the picture. A couple of bastions of sanity remain, the city of Hira whence our heroine Arian comes, from a sort of Bene Gesserit society of power wielding women, and a group of, oddly, expert horse-riders from a high mountainous region.There are basically two types of character in this story: the unerringly virtuous and the unrepentantly evil, which also, suspiciously has a near one to one correspondence with women and men respectively.This is the first in a trilogy, but it's not self-contained and ends abruptly; however I can't muster sufficient interest to care.

Arian is the First Oralist of the Companions of Hira, a quasi-religious/magical order whose members draw power from The Claim (a religious text relating to the One which has been passed won through scraps of text and oral recitation from one generation to the next). For the last 10 years Arian and her companion, Sinnia, have been hunting down slave gangs transporting women for the Talisman (an extremist religious group that follow the One-eyed Preacher who subverts The Claims to justify an extremist patriarchy that oppresses women and seeks to destroy the written word), seeking to discover where they take the women and who the Preacher is without success.

Despite the efforts of the Companions of Hira and Daniyar (a man known as the Silver Mage who protects a book called the Candour and who has a history with Arian), the Talisman are taking more and more territory so that even the Companions’ Citadel is at risk. Ilea, the High Companion (leader) has entered into a dangerous alliance with Rukh, the Black Khan who offers the Companion hope: proof of the existence of a legendary document called the Bloodprint, which contains a fragment of the Claim that none have previously seen and which they think can help rally the people against Talisman oppression.

Arian and Sinnia accept a quest to recover the Bloodprint, accompanied by Wafa (a young boy rescued by Arian from the slave gangs) and Daniyar but doing so means heading both into the Talisman heartlands and into the Plague Lands, from where no one returns …

Ausma Zehanat Khan’s fantasy novel (the first in a series) has a lot of potential with its parallels to the rise of Daesh/the Taliban but degenerates into a frustrating and disappointing affair with shallow world building that often lacks explanation and context and although the main characters are female, they are shallowly drawn, hopelessly gullible and prone to being captured purely so that they can be rescued by male characters.

I’d really wanted to like this book because it’s specifically structured around the notion of a patriarchy specifically dedicated to oppressing women with the two main female characters being part of a group that’s trying to resist it and there’s an interesting hint at the tension and power tug going on between Arian and Ilea. I also liked the religious ideas in play here (especially as there are allusions to Islam and the power of literacy and the written word) and the central Asian/middle eastern setting, which offers some intriguing world building possibilities – especially Khan’s reference to tribes and tribal loyalties.

The main problem is that Arian is such a flat, dull and gullible character that I found it very difficult to empathise with her or her plight. To begin with, she’s taken 10 years trying to discover where women are being sold to only to come up with nothing (and she ends up being told by a man, which indicates she’s failed to look for people sufficiently high enough in the Talisman to ask, which is pretty basic), she runs headlong into bad situations without thinking through the consequences and is breathtakingly gullible around men. By the end of the book I had little idea of what being the First Oralist meant, how the Claim works or what the Companions of Hira are set up to do and how they operate and while I don’t need everything spelled out in small words, Khan’s choice here not to be more explicit about certain elements made it difficult for me to fully engage with the world she’s created.

There’s a tedious will-they-won’t-they romance between Arian and Daniyar that I really didn’t care about (in part because Daniyar is also thinly characterised). I wanted to know more about Daniyar’s role as Silver Mage and what the Candour meant but that doesn’t come and while there are hints at his having trained Arian in fighting techniques it’s not clear why or whether this is normal or not and there definitely isn’t enough there to explain their supposed epic love for each other. Khan’s melodramatic writing style doesn’t help here with Arian constantly fighting her feelings and the tide of emotion in a way that made me roll my eyes (although that’s very much a personal thing).

The biggest disappointment though comes with Sinnia, Arian’s companion who again has a lot of potential given that she’s the only black character in the book (something that’s commented on frequently) and who has been deliberately placed with Arian by Ilea. Unfortunately, Sinnia has nothing to do other than stand loyally by Arian for reasons that Khan never goes into and the only conflict that arises between the two is when Sinnia gets jealous of Arian for getting the attention of a man Sinnia fancies (this is one of those books where all the male characters fancy Arian). This reduces Sinnia to little more than a token black sidekick, which made me uncomfortable – as did Sinnia’s eventual fate in the book, which was a little too on the nose for me.

Ultimately there just wasn’t enough here for me to care about enough to want to read the sequel and I’m in two minds about whether I’d check out Khan’s other work.

I normally like fantasy novels -- especially those which are about epic quests -- but I must admit that I have struggled with this one. The story concerns Arian, who is First Oralist of The Hira, who get power from a text called 'The Claim' which is, I suppose, similar to our Bible, the power from which lets them keep under control The Talisman, who are essentially a people of slavers. However Arian sets out on a quest to find The Bloodprint, rumoured further part of The Claim, which could win the fight with The Talisman forever ...

So far so good, but unfortunately I found the story really hard going. It's usual for this sort of story, which will consist of more than one book, to introduce a lot of characters, but I don't think I've ever seen so many characters introduced so quickly at the start of a book. I read a lot, and am used to complicated stories with lots of characters, but this one just left me dry, and spending so much time trying to remember who was who that I found it very difficult to enjoy the story. This is especially difficult as there are many similar characters, often not likeable, and it's fair to say that I have struggled.

I have now finished the book (after a couple of weeks -- which is a very long time for me to take to read a book), and if anything I feel relief more than anything else. Whilst the story is enjoyable to some extent, I'm really not a fan of the execution, and I find myself not particularly interested in what might come next. I've tried to like it, I really have, but it's just not for me. With apologies to the author, two stars.

A fantasy novel. Be advised that although there's nothing on the back or front about it being part of a series or trilogy, it is actually book one in a series entitled 'The Khorasan Archives.' Thus it does end on a cliffhanger with more to come.

It runs for four hundred and twenty five pages and is divided into fifty five chapters.

There are maps of the settings at the start. A cast of characters and a glossary at the back.It does contain some mild adult moments and violence.

In the world of this story, a dark power called the Talisman has arisen. Led by a one eyed preacher, they are a patriarchy with a terrible attitude to women. And they are spreading.

Among those who resist are Arian and her friend Sinnia. They've spent a long time rescuing women from slavery. But now they might really be able to make a difference. They have a chance to find an ancient text that can change things. A text called the Bloodprint...

This is one of those books that takes a while to settle down and get into. It throws you right into the action and the setting from the off, without introducing anything or anyone. So there's a lot to get used to very quickly.

What helps is the almost total focus on Arian, who is the viewpoint character for nearly all of it. And the fact that there is something interesting about the setting from the off. It's a middle eastern style world with a few Asian elements. So this is a pretty original setting. And the magic system is rather unique as well.

The prose initially intrigues, but it then becomes clear that its a book that you do need to take your time with to really get the most from, and skimming might means you will miss out.

The narrative does send them off on the aforementioned quest in due course, and it's around page one hundred when this does settle down and really click. From then on things do move along well. Although the prose style, as mentioned, does mean there are moments when you could find your attention wandering.

And it does have some obvious real world parallels. But even if they are obvious, it does make them no less thought provoking and interesting. Which they are.

Arian is a likeable enough lead, although perhaps a bit clichéd in some ways. Ultimately though this becomes one of those books that is set up for a series start, because the events of the last thirty or so pages do take it to another level entirely. But these are good developments, which do grab and do show that it has known where it is going all along. And it does end on such a big cliffhanger that it did make me want to know what happens next.

Not a book that will be for all fantasy fans, but for anyone looking for a new series that is a bit different and original, and who are prepared to make an effort, this is worth a go.

Normally I really like this novels about mistery, different ideas and actuals ways of Sociology and life stories. This book has a brilliant way to be well related to Political society.

The ways that you can see how education can change your life is a good way to express and write the story and a very important point in this moment of our lives, good sociology study. Love the way that they speak about oppression and women in different ways of living. But at some point was so hard for me to keep riding, I don't know maybe the story.Good size of the letter not difficult to read and understand. Good paper, nice cover.

This is an epic book, and clearly the first of a series. Set in a world where the Talisman are gaining ground and selling women as slaves, Arian is First Oralist of the Companions of Hira, and ancient body based at the Citadel. Her role is to speak the Claim, ancient words with a power which can withhold the Talisman. But there are legends of original texts, that speak of a throne, and the Bloodprint itself, the oldest part of the Claim. Arian is given the task to find the Bloodprint by the High Companion at Hira, meaning Arian must stop her more personal quest against the slave traders, a quest she persues in the hope of finding her sister, lost to the Talisman when she was small. But to get to the Bloodprint, Arian, and her companion Sinnia, must cross the Wall, and into the lands occupied by a figure known as the Authoritarian.

The book is very readable, and you are swept along with the story. There is an inevitable love interest; which was very romanticised. The political issues between the tribes and peoples of the world created was very well done, as Arian moved between areas controlled by different groups.

I really wanted to get caught up in this universe as the overall plotline is interesting, the two women's fight against the patriarchy is something I can get behind and the setting at crossroads of civilization in a imagined future sounded appealing.

There were just a few things that didn't work for me. First of all we were introduced to a LOT of people from the get go and that is necessary for a big series, but this was a bit overwhelming from the outset. Secondly I was disappointed with our heroines who were not as exciting and gutsy as I would have expected. Thirdly the romance part did not work for me.

There are lots of interesting themes in the book and we get some glimpses of the author's background work within human rights and, I'm guessing, feminism, but it didn't really excite me and too quite a while to get through. I don't think I'll pick up the second in series.

Khan, better known for her excellent crime novels, yet again uses genre fiction as a vehicle to explore contemporary ideologies, politics and conflicts. This time she confronts religion head on and the battle between those who use it as a tool for oppression, brutal power and a grim patriarchal hegemony, and those who see it as a force for good - the latter primarily women in the schematic of the book. It's a shame, then, that our heroine is so dependent on the hero to rescue her time and again...

Filled with the ideas and myths of the Middle East, this is brave and original in so many ways. At times, though, the complications of what she is trying to do escape Khan, and the 8-page character-list and glossary at the back is a testament to the work required of the reader.

As the first book of a projected quartet, there is the usual world-building which can slow things down, and the book ends on a cliff-hanger. An uneven, flawed book, but its ambition and conceptional boldness won me over.

Clearly the first in a series of books, the simple word to describe this literary experience is Epic. The authors scope, tackling as she does issues of religion, spirituality, socio-economics and politics at first sight would seem to a case of biting off more than one can perhaps chew, but she pulls it all of with a remarkably readable, accessible but still satisfyingly cerebral analysis of her fantasy world that, inevitably, give salient pointers to our own. It has to be said though is primarily though rooted in the fantasy genre and in that department alone doesn't disappoint, with good characters, good pace and affecting, tangible world-building to round it all off. At first, you think this just cannot work, but Ausma Zehanat Khan develops a great tale with, elegant, accomplished style. I for one, am now hooked.

I wanted to like this, I really did. I love Ausma Zehanat Khan's other series, and thought that this had lots of potential, but while I liked her real world detective work featuring detectives Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak, I think this fantasy world is not for me. If you like fantasy, do give it a try, however - she is a great writer.

I really struggled to get into this novel. The writing style just didn't sit right with me and I just couldnt lose Myself in it which I feel You should be able to.. It wasn't bringing anything to the table so I gave up.